Using Samsung Series 7 slates in the classroom in Australia

St Catherine's School is a girls school in Sydney with nearly 1,000 students and a 1:1 programme for their students. They are using Samsung Series 7 slates, running Windows and Microsoft OneNote to support learning right across the curriculum. What that means is that they can run all of their existing programmes, including the whole Microsoft suite, and their specialist learning applications in specific subject – and provide a personal tablet device for every student. Their goal is to support their student learning to meet the needs of both the curriculum, and development of their 21st century skills* of collaboration, communication etc

If you watch the video below you'll get a good idea of how individual students are using their Samsung slates in school, across many curriculum subjects, and how they mix the use of different applications in different subjects. And you also see the way that they use OneNote as a key tool right across the curriculum, for both students and teachers, and as a collaboration tool as well as for individual note taking and revision.

Paul Carnemolla, the Head of Information Systems at the school, has been responsible for ensuring that there's widespread adoption of OneNote and the whole 1:1 programme. And that's involved identifying key teaching and learning scenarios that can be enabled – for example, the use of audio recording at the same time as note taking, so that students can record their thinking whilst they are completing exercises. This feedback is useful for both students and teachers:

It's very easy to share OneNote, so a teacher can share a OneNote, so a teacher can share the same OneNote document with all of the other students in the classroom.

We know that feedback in learning is critical to student successs. The synced audio feature in OneNote enables us to get an insight into learning that we wouldn't be able to without that technology.

As Tessa Rep, Head of Biblical Studies at the school says in the video:

You have a record of everything that you've done. And you're able to collect work efficiently from students. You're able to keep that with you. And wherever you go you have all the work you need.

Although it's still in the early days for the school, you can get a very clear idea in the video of the many different ways that the Samsung slates are being used across the curriculum – and the many different types of Windows software programmes that the students are using.